Girl From The North Country – finally in Cardiff Bay’s Wales Millenium Centre – is a musical that is, despite having run since 2017, distinctly uncertain about what it is or wants to be.
Set during the Great Depression, the musical centres on Nick Laine’s boarding house and the people that pass through. Most of the narrative focuses on Laine, his wife Elizabeth and their adopted daughter Marianne, and how they navigate the complexities of poverty, disability and discrimination in early 1930s America. Girl From The North Country is the second Bob Dylan jukebox musical to have hit Broadway and has proved far more successful than 2006’s The Times They Are A Changin’. Despite the music having been heavily adapted to fit the feeling of 1930s America, fans of Dylan will still recognise several favourites in the mix, and the reorchestrations of his music by Simon Hale are undoubtedly gorgeous.
The musical is, in reality, a play with songs, which in and of itself is fine – I like plays with songs. However, in this case, the music in Girl From The North Country feels less like an indicator of mood and more like a distraction. In some moments, scenes cut off abruptly as other characters enter to sing a song (generally about how sad or wistful everyone feels), and at other points, there is no connection at all. Musical interludes can provide a nice break and offer a shift in tone, but nearly everything in the production is given so much weight and artificial poignance that it feels almost pointless to have them there.
There are some exceptions to this – Justina Kehinde’s powerful rendition of Tight Connection To My Heart, while again not a one-for-one with her scenario in the moment, is a tender expression of her character Marianne’s confusion and distress. Similarly, Eve Norris and Gregor Milne’s duet to I Want You is romantic and tragic – though does bring up another issue with the musical: everything and nothing matters.
Characters and moments are given huge importance, then never followed up on. Moments are given enormous weight without any relevant lead-up. It feels as though the script says, “well, you are a sensible person, you should know this is objectively sad,” and then expects you to feel that way. The story beats feel muddled. The inciting incident realistically doesn’t arrive until the end of Act 1. We’re meant to feel something for every character, but ultimately none of them have enough depth, and nothing extreme enough happens, for us to feel anything at all. The script is like a Chekhov play, but without the humour, and every punch is pulled.
All this to say – the cast is outstanding, and they do an incredible amount with what they’ve been given. As I have already mentioned, Justine Kehinde shines as Marianne, and her frequent scene partner Teddy Kempner fills the stage with his presence as Mr Perry. The entire cast is energetic, stylish and sensitive. Understudy Neil Stewart, as Mr Burke, reflects the character’s cognitive dissonance and guarded anxiety with great skill.
Frances McNamee is a powerhouse Elizabeth Laine. Her voice and stage presence are remarkable: it’s almost impossible not to look at her when she is onstage. Her character, however, brings me to my final issue with the piece: its approach to mental ill-health and neurodiversity. Laine is living with an unknown illness, causing emotional outbursts and bouts of forgetfulness and dissociation; though it’s not made clear in the script, interviews with creatives say she is living with a form of dementia. I don’t feel that the script and direction’s approach to this illness were clear enough. While there were a number of parallels, in the script and McNamee’s performance, to frontotemporal or a form of mixed dementia, the script failed to fully express the complexities and unfocussed grief of a mind failing, both for the individual and their family.
At points, it almost felt patronising – inferring, via the script, that Laine will say what everyone thinks but is too afraid to. Or that she looks like she doesn’t know what’s going on, but listen to how wise and observant she is’. People with dementia can be sensitive, observant and funny – I watched my grandmother live with the condition for a number of years – but the songs and monologues given to Laine in Girl From The North Country amount to “this woman is out of her mind… and that makes her most lucid person here”.
This kind of presentation gives people with mental ill health almost the status of mythic beings and serves no-one. I’m happy to be told others responded to it more positively. I’m happy to be told I’m wrong, but from where I sit, it just isn’t a realistic or fair portrayal of neurodegeneration or disability, and the rest of the show doesn’t offer much better. Certainly, it’s not McNamee’s fault: she does an excellent job with what she has.
Girl From The North Country’s music, singing and aesthetics – notably Rae Smith and Mark Henderson’s designs – are beautiful. The musical as a whole, though, is ultimately hollow.
Girl From The North Country, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, Tue 6 Dec
On until Sat 10 Dec. Tickets: £15.50-£49.50. Info: here
words HARI BERROW
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